


Chuck Versus the Family Business

by rivkat



Series: Chuck Versus the Uncanny [2]
Category: Chuck - Fandom, Supernatural
Genre: Multi, Offscreen Torture, Vampires, excessive attention to costuming
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-07
Updated: 2011-11-07
Packaged: 2017-10-25 19:46:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/274061
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rivkat/pseuds/rivkat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Chuck and the Winchesters hunt vampires.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Chuck Versus the Family Business

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pinkfinity (heidi)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/heidi/gifts).



> Don’t even try to match the continuity; AU from after S3 of Chuck and vague post-S6 setting for SPN. Plenty of other subtext, including Sarah/Chuck/Casey.  
> Additional warning: Dean knows lines from _Chicago_.

“Sarah,” Chuck said and immediately forgot his carefully planned discussion of the day’s business. “Hey, uh, yeah.” That answered the question of whether the absence of Shaw had diminished the awkwardness from their latest round of will-they-or-won’t-they. Well, they _had_ , and Chuck was committed to believing that they _were going to_ , but they _weren’t_ at this exact moment, and Chuck couldn’t even say that the reasons were bad ones.

“Yes, Chuck?” Sarah looked up from the gun she was assembling.

Chuck cleared his throat and tried again. “I hear there’s a pretty good taco stand that just opened up on the other side of the mall. We would have to cross five lanes of traffic to get there, kind of a live-action Frogger thing, but I for one would go further than that for a good fish taco.”

Casey, who’d been fiddling with a sniper scope, snorted. Chuck turned and frowned at him.

“Sounds good, Chuck. Why don’t you come, too, John?” Sarah asked, either because she didn’t want to be alone with Chuck or because she actually cared about Casey’s ability to share in the promised taste sensation. Maybe both—Sarah was a very caring person, if you got past the adamantium walls. Which Chuck totally planned to do again, no matter how long it took, and if Casey came along for the ride, Chuck was okay with that.

Did that come out right? Chuck wasn’t sure if that was a question that could be asked about an interior monologue.

Meanwhile, Casey had made a sound that Chuck, through long experience, was able to translate into an affirmative.

Chuck had to supply most of the dialogue in the resulting journey, though he was used to that, and he did manage to explain his theory about how they could use their current downtime to practice more combination moves, so that when Chuck yelled out “Number three!” they’d all know what to do. Sarah said she thought it was an interesting idea, which meant that she thought it was a terrible idea but probably harmless, and Casey didn’t say anything at all, which meant that he wanted to think it over before deciding how to mock it. Not bad for a first try, if Chuck did say so himself.

They were coming back from the taco stand, Casey setting his usual brisk pace and Chuck and Sarah following in perfect spy formation, when all of their phones went off at once. Chuck glanced down, saw it was the General text-demanding their presence in Castle, and quickly unwrapped his first taco so he could eat and walk at the same time.

He was guessing that delicious tacos were about to be a lower priority in his life.

Chuck was vindicated when the General glared so hard at them over the videoscreen that Sarah and Casey didn’t make a move towards their own food. “Agents,” she said, “the Army has suffered a serious security breach. A major potential weapon has—” she paused, and her mouth pursed in disapproval. “Escaped.”

“How does a weapon escape?” Casey asked for all of them, though Chuck had the sinking feeling that he knew.

“This weapon—” The General sighed. “It’s-- _they’re_ \--unusual.” And then she began to explain.

After a minute, Chuck interrupted, because he couldn’t keep himself silent. “You’re telling me that the government is secretly testing _vampires_ as supersoldiers?” The Intersect looked substantially less silly by comparison, was all he was saying.

“Technically—” Chuck waited, but the General didn’t finish. “Your mission is to retrieve the individuals, alive if possible, but containment is a higher priority. Their tracking chips are still functioning, but they’re only accurate to within fifty meters, and they’ve been staying in high-density areas.”

After a few more words with Sarah and Casey about weaponry and civilian information control, she signed off, and then they were just staring at each other.

“Vampires?” Sarah said, which did seem worth repeating. But she shook herself, becoming Competent Agent Who Takes Everything Seriously in an instant. “How do we find a vampire in a crowd if they don’t really burst into flames in sunlight?”

Casey scratched his chin, looking thoughtful. “General said they were faster and stronger than humans,” and he sounded eager enough that Chuck was going to have to warn him about not going hand to hand with monsters if there were any alternatives.

“Yes, and if we could get them to run races, I’m sure that would help,” Sarah said, just a little annoyed. “Chuck, can you review all the security footage from the Army experiments and see if you can figure out how to distinguish them?”

“I can do that, yeah,” Chuck agreed. “But also, here’s an idea: we should call in the experts.”

****

Sam cleared his throat. Some of the roughly twenty coffee-drinkers in the place looked up, marginally interested.

Dean sighed. “Listen up, everybody!” he snapped. “We are federal agents Goldstein and Nimmer. Someone here is illegally downloading movies from the internet on the free wi-fi. If you are not that someone, we’re going to have to ask you to leave.”

In under sixty seconds, the place was clear except for one gawky teenaged kid, who Dean seriously hoped wasn’t sitting in a puddle of his own piss, because his day did not need that kind of glory. Sam, plainly having the same thought, indicated with a jerk of his chin that Dean should go talk to him, Dean being the one who’d terrified him into immobility. Sam went off to make nice with the owner, whose anger at losing all her customers Sam was going to placate by assuring her that the FBI wasn’t at all interested in blaming the coffee shop for the actions of a rogue tea-drinker.

Dean moseyed up to the teen, who if anything grew more statue-like, and took a look at his computer, then nodded to himself.

“How old are you?” Dean asked when he sat down across from the kid.

It took the boy more than a few tries to get his mouth working. “Suh—seventeen,” he managed.

“ _Big Jocks, Big Cocks II_ , hunh?” Dean made it a rhetorical question. “Lemme give you some advice, kid. First of all, volume three is ten times better. Second, don’t download this shit. That’s what PornTube is for. Third, when you do get your hands on an actual other person, don’t pound away at them like these guys do. Remember that looking good and feeling good are two different things, and if you’re not sure, _ask_ the dude you’re with. Or the girl, that part’s pretty much the same. You hear me?”

The kid nodded desperately. Dean could feel Sam across the room trying not to let his eyes fall out of his head, either because Dean was being nice in the middle of a hunt or because Sam had some idea of the contents of _Big Jocks, Big Cocks I-IV_.

“Now go and sin no more,” Dean told him. “Or, anyway, sin somewhere else.”

The boy fled, almost forgetting to take his computer with him. Dean checked in with Sam, who nodded to show that the owner and staff had also been kicked out, and they got to work.

This was a good job, Dean thought. Easy enough, but still needing both of them, Sam on research and Dean with the hands-on application. Banishing a heart-attack-inducing curse was a good reminder of why it wasn’t just crippling codependence and shellshock keeping them together.

Right as Dean finished etching the last cleansing symbol onto the underside of the cursed Clover machine, Sam’s cellphone rang. “Hello?” Dean heard, with the careful tone that said that Sam didn’t recognize the caller’s number.

“Chuck?” Sam asked. Dean swore and banged his head painfully on the metal as he hauled his ass upright. He’d really thought they were done with all that prophecy bullshit, and if Chuck was contacting _them_ then ‘clusterfuck’ was likely to be an understatement.

“How did you get this number?” Sam asked, and Dean closed his mouth. The prophet Chuck shouldn’t have had any problem with that. Sam glanced at Dean, and Dean gave him his most eloquent ‘dude, what the fuck?’ expression. Sam mouthed something that Dean didn’t understand, what with most of Sam’s attention still being on the phone call. Chuck was being a talkative bastard, apparently, because Sam was listening, nodding a little as if Chuck could see him, and generally being annoying, which in this case meant ignoring Dean.

“Sam!” Dean hissed.

Sam jumped a little and put his phone on speaker.

“—So, when they said ‘vampires,’ I thought, ‘I know someone who probably knows what to do with vampires, and probably could use being owed a favor by a powerful and secretive government organization, seeing as how you do tend to get arrested more than you probably want to be,’ and so I was thinking that maybe you could come out to Burbank—”

Dean lost track of the narrative because he was reorienting. That was not Chuck Shurley. That was that college friend of Sam’s, the one who’d dropped out of Stanford to become a government psychic. So the call was more on the order of the ordinary slog that was their lives instead of literally apocalyptic suckage. They were, just as of this minute, between hunts, and maybe they could use somebody else to talk to besides each other; they were doing fine, all things considered, but there was a lot of shit to consider. Working with new people who knew about the supernatural life might be almost like taking a vacation. Bonus, the spy chick was super hot.

Dean rubbed the back of his neck and suggested, “Ask him how many vampires,” because from what Dean had seen (and heard) this Chuck sometimes had performance issues in getting to the point.

****

Chuck had rarely been more grateful that Sarah and Casey gave him the benefit of the doubt on keeping Sam and his brother on the down low. Convincing the General to authorize outside consultants who were _not_ wanted as felons only because they were supposed to be dead would have taken a lot more energy than he had at the moment. He was too busy accessing all the vampire-related records in the Intersect (gross, and also largely unhelpful, since they were focused on experiments on the things once captured and not on the process of capture itself) and reading the materials Sam had uploaded for him.

“How do you know they’ll help?” Sarah had asked. “The older one definitely had an attitude.”

Chuck had thought about the file he’d flashed through. “Because that’s what they do,” he said.

Sure enough, after some initial wobbling, plus Chuck’s explanation of how he’d put together various reported credit card frauds, unexplained deaths, and random phenomena (including message board reports of the sighting of one of the five cherry 1967 Impalas in the country) to find Sam’s current identity, Sam had agreed to come to California—they were in New Mexico, a day’s hard drive away, which gave the Buy More team time to assimilate all the vampire-related information they could find.

Chuck was definitely not allowing Morgan in on this one. He’d think that vampires were so cool he was likely to get himself killed or, worse, vamped. It would be classic to have to kill his own best friend to save him, and while Chuck appreciated the classics, he’d prefer to keep that one onscreen, thanks.

While Chuck was learning the differences between Buffy vampires and real vampires, Sarah was watching the footage of their escape for the third time. He knew she could handle the blood and death, but he was a little worried about the whole ‘surveillance while death is dealt’ issue, since it hadn’t been so long since she’d been the one on tape. Even though she hadn’t been a soulless creature of the night while doing her own killing, he had the sinking feeling that she might think that made her _worse_ than the vampires. Meanwhile, Casey was off doing—hey, what was Casey doing again?

“Sleeping gas,” Casey said without turning around when Chuck found him in the armory. “Knock out the civilians, leave the vamps standing so we know who’s who.”

Chuck thought about that for a second. They had excellent pictures of the five escapees, but they had no idea how many new vampires those escapees had turned, so they did need some way to distinguish hostiles from nonhostiles. “They don’t go down with conventional sedatives, but maybe gas will work. But what if they use the now conveniently placed and helpless civilians as hostages?”

Casey shrugged, and Chuck resolved to think of a better idea. “This would be a lot easier if we could go public,” he continued. “I asked the General about announcing some kind of medical emergency or chemical leak that would allow us to quarantine the entire area and screen people as they left, but she said no go. Too much publicity.” Chuck would have ordered it on his own authority, because publicity was nothing compared to people being used as drink pouches for monsters, but he wasn’t a general and he doubted local reporters would listen to a Nerd Herder warning of the impending vampocalypse.

“Hey, speaking of sedatives,” Chuck realized, “can you get us a bunch of dead man’s blood? Apparently that’s like vampire Valium. Drink it or inject it, either way they lose the ability to fight back.”

Casey’s eyebrows raised; he was always interested in learning about new ways to harm things. “Hunh. Have to be a dead _man_?”

Chuck’s mouth fell open. Trust Casey to come up with a logical and yet completely unexpected question when it came to weaponry. “Um—I guess it’s a figure of speech?”

“You guess, or you know?” Casey growled. He shook his head, seeing the answer on Chuck’s face. “Never mind, I’ll get it from men. Can it be dried, or does it have to be liquid? If it has to be liquid, can I mix it with anticoagulants to keep it working longer?”

Chuck winced. “I’m just gonna give you Sam’s number, okay, and you can talk specs with him.”

He fled before Casey could do more than just give him the look that said he’d never kick as much ass as a real spy.

****

Dean had always known there had to be secret government outposts underneath big mall stores. Well, not that specific, but the general idea: the world was full of hidden things, most of them bad, but occasionally cool.

Chuck Bartowski (Dean wasn’t quite ready to call him ‘good Chuck,’ but maybe ‘tall Chuck’ or ‘geek Chuck’ was going to work; he was still thinking about it) met them at the Nerd Herd counter, right where Dean had first encountered him in his fruitless search for a real Walkman.

“Hey, Sam, hey, Dean,” he said, waving frantically, as if they’d have forgotten him _and_ been able to ignore a six foot four guy in a painfully geeky short-sleeved-shirt-and-tie combo. Dean made a mental note to try the tech support disguise more often—it automatically ratcheted the threat level down even though he knew for a fact that Nerd Chuck had major mojo and a couple of well-armed keepers besides.

He took them past a couple of even more disturbingly geeky employees and led them down the hidden stairway, nodding to them in the middle of chattering about stuff Dean already knew about vampires and excitedly exchanging theories with Sam.

“So, you actually work at the Buy More too,” Dean said, interrupting a digression about rakshasa. He wasn’t book-smart like the geek Gigantors in front of him, but he could tell when there was a familiarity that only came from hating the same customers.

“Oh, uh, yeah,” Chuck said, turning to look at him for the first time since he’d realized that Sam was his psychic intellectual soulmate or whatever. “I’m now pretty much full-time with the spy thing, but the government covers for me by supposedly hiring me to do offsite installation and service, so my, uh, co-workers, if you can really call them workers which I’m not sure I would, don’t know what I do.”

Dean shook his head. “Man, if it was me, I’d make ‘em pay me like a supermodel and quit my day job.”

Chuck blinked, shocked. “But then I wouldn’t have a cover!”

Dean thought that a cover as a Buy More employee was probably not the most helpful thing for a spy, or a psychic, but then he wasn’t either one of those.

When they got to the secure government area, it was still just as intimidating as it had been the first time, except that the hot chick was, sadly, missing. They sat down at a table in front of some high-tech equipment that made Dean feel almost like James Bond himself and watched a tape of the vampires’ escape. Dean would’ve thought that he’d have an easy time of it, but usually he only saw the aftermath, or he was close enough to the action that he had to worry about saving himself and whoever else could be saved. Watching already-dead people die was not a good way to start a hunt. It reminded him of watching Meg use Sam’s body to kill, or—other times he’d been present for a slaughter.

As Chuck explained more about how the vampires had been held so that the government could figure out what made them tick (short answer: blood and killing people) and see if that could somehow be turned into Homeland Security, Sam got angrier and angrier, until he was practically vibrating with outrage. “This is an atrocity! The government put all these people in harm’s way! You don’t study vampires who insist on killing people, you put them down!”

Dean snorted while Chuck raised his hands like he wasn’t sure whether Sam was going to start throwing punches. Sam wasn’t wrong, but—“Sammy, that’s only the plot of, like, every third science fiction movie ever. What do you expect from the Men in Black? Anyway, it’s not like we can go Woodward and Bernstein on the conspiracy to weaponize vampires.”

Sam stared at Dean with his usual intensity when Dean was being practical (excuse him, ‘morally obtuse’). “If we help them cover this up—”

“Then we’ll be _killing vampires_ , the thing you just said we should be doing, right?”

“I’ll tell them,” Chuck said resolutely. “I’ll make sure the message gets to the right people.”

Dean privately didn’t think much of that, either. Even if Chuck was, against the evidence, a well-respected part of the national security team, the supernatural was too rich a source of power for anybody _in_ power to ignore once they knew about it. Which probably explained a lot about Dick Cheney, come to think of it.

“You mentioned something about ammo?” Dean asked, because the conversation was going nowhere.

Like that was the magic word, the other big guy—Casey, though Dean didn’t know whether that was his first name or his last—popped up out of nowhere. “Come to the armory. I want you to pick out stuff that’s good for killing vampires.”

Sam and Chuck continued to jerk each other off over respect for human life and shit like that, so Dean went with Casey.

“Oh my God,” Dean said when Casey showed him what he meant by ‘armory.’ Dean felt like he’d slammed an entire fifth of whiskey while getting a blowjob. A really good blowjob. “Can I--?”

Casey inspected Dean. His mouth twisted. “Tell you what,” he said. “Take what we need for this job—and you can take what you want, too.”

Dean didn’t hesitate, just grabbed a duffel bag sitting in the corner and started stuffing grenades, C-4, and other interesting-looking items in as carefully as the situation warranted while they discussed dead man’s blood. Unfortunately, while Dean could say for a fact that dead woman’s blood worked fine, he couldn’t answer Casey’s other questions, and the G-man was right that it would be useful to know whether, say, a shotgun shell packed with dried blood would also do the trick. Vampires plus distance weapon against vampires equalled a much better idea than stabbing them. So maybe there was some merit to experimenting on vampires, though Dean was of the opinion that locking the supernatural up longterm never made sense.

“The anticoagulant’s worth trying,” Dean admitted as he zipped up his bonus duffel, packed as full as would fit into the Impala. He had acquired a _mini flamethrower_ , which justified the trip right there. “Think we can rig up an aerosol sprayer?” Yeah, inhaling blood would be nasty for the people they expected the vampires to be hiding among. But it would suck a lot more, pun intended, to get eaten, and it might be their best chance of sorting the quick from the undead.

Casey grunted an affirmative. “I can blow their heads off when they’re down, right?” he asked, with the tone of a man double-checking because he didn’t want to miss his favorite part.

Dean approved. “We tend to cut ‘em off, but a couple of hollow-points right on target should do the trick.”

Casey reached into one of his many pockets and held out a black-and-red box.

Dean whistled. “How the fuck do you have Black Talon bullets?” He’d heard about how well they killed, but he’d never had the opportunity to see them in action, seeing as how they’d supposedly been discontinued for over ten years.

Casey smirked, righteous and well-armed. “That’s a state secret.” But he tossed Dean the box.

****

Sarah joined Chuck and Sam soon after Dean and Casey went off to do some male bonding over weapons of mass destruction. Chuck was dubious about the wisdom of that; neither of them seemed to need any encouragement. But Casey as per usual hadn’t asked Chuck’s opinion, and Dean had just smirked at them all like he’d won the jackpot, so Chuck focused on his part of the job.

Sarah had been following the trackers—five of them, four in one cluster and the remaining one on its own, all in downtown LA. Busy commercial areas, Sarah said. The four were most likely in a restaurant-slash-nightclub that was open 24 hours. The theme was, naturally, Heaven and Hell. “Because that’s not in any way cliché,” Chuck commented. Sam looked more pained than usual—and from what Chuck had seen, Sam really needed to turn his frown upside down on a more regular basis, though even with just the patchy information from the Intersect Chuck could see where a guy with Sam’s life might be a teensy bit emo.

They had a brief debate over whether to go after the lone wolf—vampire—first and then take down the clot (heh), but they quickly agreed that the risk that the group of four would scatter meant that the harder job should be done first.

“Is there any chance the vampires know about the trackers?” Sam asked. “It’s not as if the vampires are alive in the first place, so how would we be able to tell if a tracker had been ripped out?”

Sarah quickly brought up the specs on the computer and they both leaned over her shoulders, though Chuck noted with approval that Sam was careful to do so in a non-touching, respectful, eyes-only-on-the-screen way. Whereas Chuck was pretty sure that if Sam’s brother had been present, Chuck would’ve been forced to do something to protect Sarah’s honor. Something like: watch while Sarah kicked Dean’s ass. But anyway, Sam’s presence was a real timesaver in that regard.

“According to the records, they were stuck with enough needles that they might’ve missed the tracker injection,” Sarah said after a minute. “Anyway, the trackers are still our best leads.”

****

In the privacy of his own head, Dean could admit that he really, really liked prepping for a job. It just felt good to take the time to get all the weapons ready and properly stowed. Right now, there was also a fair amount of eye candy involved.

Casey, for example, was wearing a dark blue paramilitary-style outfit that made clear just how much muscle there was in that ramrod-straight frame, with lots of little leather cases looking like random accessories but actually holding his weapons. Sam had dressed down with a white tank top that went a bit further than Casey’s getup, providing a detailed visual guide to each individual muscle whether covered by cloth or not, and cargo pants roomy enough to hide his knives, not that anyone would be looking that far down.

Sarah had gone the dominatrix route, thank fuck, with a kind of stacked black rubber ring necklace thing that highlighted the length of her neck and, not for nothing, provided a bite guard. Her hair was sleeked back into a high ponytail, with silver barrettes on each side that turned out to be handles for the razor wire coiled between them, and Dean couldn’t keep back his “Awesome!” when she explained that. Also thank fuck, she seemed to understand that he was completely sincere and would have had the same reaction even had she not been otherwise dressed like a leather wet dream, all straps and grommets, her knives tucked into her thigh-high boots.

“What about you?” she asked, staring at Dean.

He gave her his best shit-eating grin. “I get into bars no matter how I’m dressed.”

Yeah, so that didn’t work, even when Dean pointed out that Geek Chuck had also not changed, which led to the revelation that Sarah expected Chuck to sit in the surveillance van and coordinate, which led to the further revelation that Chuck expected to do no such thing. Dean tuned that fight out, and ultimately found himself in the government’s costume room, which, he had to admit, made up for a lot of having to get dressed to impress some poser club kids.

Chuck flailed around while Dean picked out a black T-shirt and black leather pants to go with his shitkicker boots. Dean tucked the shirt over the weapons stored at the small of his back and looked at himself in the full-length mirror. “Dude, I am rocking the John Crichton look,” he said to himself.

“You watch _Farscape_?” Chuck asked, a bit disbelieving.

“Aeryn Sun,” Dean said in his best duh-voice.

Chuck paused, then: “Aeryn Sun,” with deep conviction. Of course, Chuck had his own kick-ass warrior chick, but as far as Dean could tell they were both in pining mode right now, which was sad, especially since Dean had the feeling that offering Sarah a little recreational distraction would end with parts of his body in places they didn’t want to be. “Um,” Chuck said, “do you have any thoughts on what I should wear?”

Dean looked him over carefully. The hair could be slicked back, which he did, despite Chuck’s squirming, and then he got Chuck into a black button-down with the top couple of buttons undone and some black slacks. Chuck wasn’t as built as Sam (or Casey), but there were pro basketball players not as built as Sam, and, once Dean rolled up Chuck’s sleeves and added matching black leather wristcuffs and a bit of black eyeliner, Chuck was total club material.

Sarah and Casey certainly seemed to think so, when Dean brought out his creation, sneaking looks at Chuck like they couldn’t help themselves. Dean bet they thought they were being subtle, which made him hope they did the spy stuff better when they weren’t personally involved.

*****

In the end, Chuck managed to argue Sarah and Casey into letting him take the place of the bartender, where he could dose everyone’s drinks with dead man’s blood. Chuck had initially maintained that Casey was usually the bartender and Chuck the operative, but that argument had gone unheeded, since they didn’t need Chuck’s ability to flash. Everyone agreed that the safest place was behind the bar where Chuck could hide a machete. And honestly, the thought that he might need to use a machete was enough to keep him from fighting too hard to take a more exposed position.

The building was on a block entirely surrounded by parking lots, an oasis of artificial light reflecting off a sea of windshields. The night was clear and warm, and if he’d been taking Sarah on a date it would have been perfect. Instead he was reviewing blueprints in his head (two floors, plus a basement with plenty of room) and trying to figure out if he could tell where his companions had stored their weapons (those leather pants in particular were very form-fitting).

Sam and Dean seemed disconcerted by all the personnel deployed to lock the building down once the five of them entered. Chuck guessed the Winchesters weren’t used to having quite so much backup. Anyone who left would be quickly detained by soldiers posing as CDC employees, injected with dead man’s blood, and released if there was no reaction, with a cover story about a fast-spreading variant of H1N1. Inside, though, it was all on the team to find the vampires and take them out before any civilians saw anything that couldn’t easily be explained away.

Casey slipped in through the back entrance to take out the bartender, because that at least was standard, while Chuck, Sarah, and the Winchesters approached the doorman’s scrutiny. “I still feel like we should be turning these people away,” Chuck whispered to Sarah.

“You know we can’t afford to tip the fugitives off until it’s too late,” she responded in kind. Sarah did not like to use the word ‘vampires,’ Chuck had discovered. She’d been so cool about the Princess Leia costume, but he guessed that was different than taking part in a real-life horror movie.

Ahead of them, Dean grinned widely as he and Sam were passed inside. Chuck heard the bouncer ask which gym Sam used, and even with all the neon around Chuck could tell that Sam was blushing and that Dean couldn’t decide whether to mock or feel his own masculinity threatened. Chuck was getting the sense that having an older brother was very different from having an older sister.

Chuck smiled at the doorman, wasted effort since the guy couldn’t take his eyes off of Sarah, not that Chuck could blame him. All Chuck got was a once-over that expressed vague disbelief that Chuck was actually _with_ this amazing woman, and Chuck had the urge to explain himself, but he could tell that it was in fact an urge to tell Sarah again that they should be together for real and not just as part of a mission. He was good at multitasking, but now was not the time.

They proceeded to the bar, which was in between Heaven and Hell. That could’ve made a good metaphor if it hadn’t been so easy to see up the skirts of the girls in Heaven, what with the transparent steps up to the second floor. Casey was just coming out from behind the service area, and he nodded at Chuck, who scooted around to take up his position behind the bar. Casey had left the vials of dead man’s blood right under the sink, next to the highball glasses.

“Hey,” a woman wearing a halo, fluffy wings, and very little else said, leaning over the bar with a tray of empties in her hand, “where’s Stu?”

“Sick,” Chuck said, which was undoubtedly close to how the guy would feel when he woke up from whatever Casey had done to him. “I’m filling in. What’ve you got for me?”

She listed off some truly ridiculous drink names—Touched by an Angel, really?--along with an order for some actual beer. Chuck consulted the Intersect and started working, scanning the crowd as he poured to look for the escaped vampires.

****

Dean bellied up to the bar and waited his turn. Chuck had decent sleight-of-hand, he noticed, getting the dead man’s blood even into beer bottles so quickly that no one who wasn’t watching for it would’ve seen. Chuck saw him and shook his head slightly—so he’d also come up empty on the vamps whose faces they knew—and then ambled away.

“Hey,” Dean snapped, and Chuck looked at him like he’d started belting out the National Anthem or something. “Can a guy get a drink around here?”

“Oh!” Chuck hesitated, as if he wasn’t sure that Dean should be drinking on the job. Dean couldn’t explain to him that his tolerance was just a little bit higher than the average bear’s—the term ‘functional alcoholic’ existed for a reason. But that wasn’t a conversation he could have even with an ordinary barkeep, so Dean just grinned toothily at him. “What’ll you have?”

“Corona for me, ice water for the lady, and a Devil Made Me Do It for my buddy,” Dean said. He was constitutionally required to give Sam a hard time, no matter what kind of memories it stirred up.

Dean took his drinks back to where Sam and Sarah were scoping out the crowds, at a little table right by the stairs. He looked around with the same casual curiosity, just another guy checking out the T&A on display, taking some time to sneer at the wings etched on the glass walls and at the pitchfork designs embedded in the marble floors. Sarah took a time-out from her surveillance to scrutinize him as if she could see his desire to smash it all, and then Sam noticed her noticing. Sam just shrugged uncomfortably and said, “We’ve got … religious issues,” which made Dean want to punch him.

“Heads up,” Dean said, because _his_ mind was on the fucking job, “six o’clock.” He chugged his beer and slid out of his seat to get next to the hottie in the teeny-tiny red dress, who looked a lot better here than she had in the government videos.

He put himself almost in front of her—with a human woman, you never totally blocked her way unless you wanted to set off her creepazoid alert, and he doubted vampire chicks were that different—and smiled, lazy and friendly.

She looked him over and smiled right back. Yeah, he still had it.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi.” Even with the noise surrounding them, he could hear the humor in it. They both knew they were just getting the formalities out of the way. She bit her lip; it was a pretty lip. “You wanna go in the back, where we can talk?”

“You’re a genius,” he said.

Once they were in the deserted hallway, the muted thump of the music still rumbling through them like a heartbeat, it was simple to press her up against the wall with one hand while reaching for the syringe in his back pocket with the other. He flicked off the cap with his thumb and had her sagging helplessly before she could even fang out on him. And then he used the garotte—he’d have preferred the machete, all told, but that would’ve been hard to smuggle in without going Sam’s route of big, baggy pants, and he just wasn’t down with that.

Her head popped off—the black T-shirt was good for more than making him look better--and he looked up to see Sam and Sarah hanging back, letting him take care of business. Sarah could’ve been watching somebody stack oranges at the grocery store; she either had a fantastic poker face or she didn’t really mind watching something that looked human get iced.

“I’ll get the body out the back door,” Sam volunteered. They hadn’t ever discussed it outright, but they weren’t turning over any intact vampires to the government. But they still needed the feds’ resources for disposal, especially if they didn’t want the people inside to panic when someone stumbled over a corpse.

“Don’t forget the head,” Dean said, helpfully, and smirked innocently at Sam’s scowl.

Then a second escapee entered the hallway, either to figure out where his companion had gone or to share in the drinking. They all gaped at each other for a couple of seconds, and then the vampire was staggering back against the wall, a slender blood-slicked knife sticking out of his chest.

Dean was impressed. He’d barely seen Sarah’s hand move.

Sam handed over his machete—Dean noticed that, for all Sarah was into Chuck, she looked a little disappointed when Sam was able to pull it out through a hole he’d put in one of his pockets instead of dropping trou—and Dean took care of vamp #2 as well. Then he was treated to the sight of Sam dragging _two_ headless corpses down the hallway, hands fisted in their sagging shirts and heads squeezed under his arms, like a suburban resident with an excess of luggage.

“Found one,” Casey’s voice hissed in Dean’s ear. “Northwest corner. Red shirt.”

“Well, that’s appropriate,” Dean said, and Chuck made a choked-off sound, which was more appreciation than he usually got for his excellent sense of humor, so he chalked up a point in Chuck’s favor.

“I’m sorry your friend’s feeling so poorly,” Chuck said loudly through the comms—subtle the dude was not—“Why don’t I help him into the back office to sit down until he stops feeling so woozy?”

“You go to Casey,” Sarah said quickly. “I’ll help Chuck.”

Dean nodded and hurried back out into the press of bodies and noise.

****

Chuck could totally handle a vampire on his own, no worries. Okay, some worries, but the vampire in this case was drugged and pliant, sagging—or was that sloshing?—against him as they shuffled down the tiny, poorly lit hallway. The vampire’s mouth was only inches from Chuck’s neck! He tried to discreetly increase the distance, but the vampire just tilted more in response, and the only thing keeping him from screaming was that Chuck was pretty sure that the vampire would be falling over if Chuck let go.

He wanted this to be ‘the vampire.’ Not Oliver Gunderson, born in 1973, graduated from Cal State Fresno, employed until 2004 as a bookkeeper in a small dry-cleaning chain on the coast. Dean and Sam had been adamant that, whatever the person had been, the vampire part was in charge now. The footage he’d seen had supported that claim, but—those vampires, _this_ vampire, had also been tortured by the government to figure out what made them tick. Chuck had seen Sarah and Casey leave behind a fair amount of carnage when necessary for their own escapes. If they could only get the vampire safely secured, maybe they could find out if there was an Oliver left in there after all.

He managed to get the vampire dumped into the chair in front of the manager’s desk, which looked oddly like Big Mike’s desk at the Buy More. In fact the Buy More could have stocked this office almost in its entirety, if you skipped over the naked-woman-of-the-month calendar, and probably that could’ve been snagged out of Jeff or Lester’s locker. “Hey,” Chuck told the vampire—Oliver—“how are you feeling?”

“Unnnnghh,” Oliver said, which was going to make it difficult to figure out if he was still homicidal. It was still homicidal, right? Even if he was no longer human, he was _killing_ humans, so, definitely homicidal. Or possibly not, which was exactly the problem: Chuck couldn’t in good conscience turn him over to a top-secret government research program if there was any chance he was an upright but undead citizen.

“So, uh, Oliver.”

Chuck’s knowledge of his name was evidently surprising enough to get the vampire’s attention even through the dead man’s blood. Chuck watched, ready to kick and scream if necessary, as Oliver struggled to focus. “Hypothetically, if we offered you the opportunity to behave yourself and, you know, do takeout blood instead of killing people, how would you feel about that?”

“… Fuck you,” Oliver said, not promisingly. “…Gonna rip your, your spine …”

Which, of course, was when Sarah arrived, ending all possibility of negotiation. Even though she told him to turn away, he knew that he ought to be willing to watch. Oliver managed to go all fangy before she wrapped the razor wire around his neck, but his blood looked the same as anybody else’s. Chuck tried to remember that it _was_ somebody else’s blood. That didn’t help much.

“That’s three,” Sarah said, efficiently tying off the trashbag containing Oliver’s head. “You should get back out there, keep dosing drinks and scanning the crowd in case you can find the one we’re still missing. I’m going to go help Casey.”

Chuck fled before he could find out what she planned to do with the body.

****

Redshirt checked Dean out in the way guys did when they were looking for competition, not company, so Dean gave up on the sex decoy idea immediately; too much to ask for it to work twice in one night. He felt Casey’s presence behind him—dude was as big as Sam, which was saying something (something he’d never say out loud, but whatever). He’d still rather have Sam at his back, but on the other hand if he never had to see Sam and vampires in the same room again it would be too soon.

Sarah swept past them like a fighter plane, all sharp edges. Dean let himself look, because anybody within thirty yards who was into girls was looking too, and Redshirt couldn’t help himself either even though the rubber rings around her neck would undoubtedly stick in his teeth.

She smiled at Redshirt (Sam had made him look at the dossiers, but what kind of word was dossier anyway, plus they were all vampires, just like they were all lost souls on the rack; knowing more would only get in the way of the job). Now, in reality, no girl as hot as Sarah would’ve gone for Redshirt, at least not unless Redshirt was wearing a Patek Philippe watch and the girl had serious self-esteem problems besides, but hope springs eternal and so Redshirt didn’t seem as shocked as he should’ve been when Sarah leaned in to speak into his ear.

Redshirt grinned, which made him look better. He tilted his head and said something back, and Sarah laughed. She edged closer—

But then Redshirt looked around, and his face tightened with unease. Almost as if he was looking for people and not seeing the ones he expected. He said something to Sarah, not even bothering to turn to face her all the way.

Dean stumbled forward, double-time, and sloshed his beer down the exact center of Redshirt’s red shirt. “Whoah,” he said. “You should watch where you’re going, dude.”

 _Now_ he had the vampire’s attention. “Excuse me?” Redshirt was mad, working his way up to outraged, and he wasn’t worrying about his dead friends any more.

Dean shoved him in the shoulder. “Yeah, excuse you.”

“Listen, you mouth-breathing—”

“Really?” Dean interrupted, hoping to get the show on the road with minimal fuss. “Wanna take this out back?”

The vampire snarled, though he kept his human face on. “Fine, asshole.”

Dean caught Casey’s eye, raising an eyebrow and hoping Casey picked up on the idea that Redshirt should think he was going off, alone, with an easy victim. Dean swaggered towards the back, putting just enough drunk into his walk to make Redshirt extra confident. He didn’t like turning his back on a vampire, but they were in public and the chance of getting bit from behind was pretty low.

As soon as they were around the bend in the hallway cutting them off from the rest of the club, Dean spun around, and nearly got a faceful of pissed-off vamp—fuckers were fast, had to give them that—as he brought his knife up. It wouldn’t have been much of a wound under ordinary circumstances; Dean’d given worse to Sam sparring, but with the dead man’s blood the vamp choked and fell back, and Casey’s big-ass knife flashed out easy as the flick of a windshield wiper.

“Dude,” Dean said respectfully, stepping back from the spray of blood and wondering where Casey was going to put the knife. (Thigh sheath, it turned out.)

“Okay, shut it down,” Casey said into thin air. This whole comms thing was awesome, even better than the headsets Dean had gotten to use in Hollywood. Dean was also a fan of preventing further civilians from entering. According to the plan, they had fifteen more minutes to go through the place looking for piles of corpses or other vamptastic leavings before everyone already inside would be herded out due to the faked-up health scare Chuck had planned. With any luck, even if the vamps had made some baby vamps, those would be too new to the game to put up organized resistance when the mock-CDC moved in.

“You wanna check out the basement?” Casey asked. “Walker and Bartowski can run crowd control.”

Dean hit his own earpiece. “Sam, cleanup on aisle four.”

“Fuck you,” Sam said, after a fifteen-second delay which had to be Sam figuring out how to work the comms (Dean grinned to himself). “We hitting the basement?”

“Fine,” Dean sighed, because even if someone did stumble onto the corpse parts that Casey was even now shoving into a supply closet, they were all going to be evacuated anyway in a few minutes, so there wasn’t much need to worry about mass panic.

They met at the top of the stairs. There was a macho moment about who was going to go down first, which Sam resolved by rolling his eyes and telling Casey that he should watch their six, almost as if Sam had actually listened to all those war movies Dean had exposed him to. They went down fast, blood-tipped dartguns at the ready, which sounded wimpy but was a really good idea if Dean did say so himself now that they had no further need for concealment.

The basement was well-lit and well-organized, almost a disappointment, though there were a couple of darker corners where extra barstools and broken tables were piled. Nothing big enough to hide a drained corpse. Casey signalled that Dean should go on into the storeroom ahead.

Grinning, Dean stepped through the doorway.

****

Most of the clubgoers went, grumbling but obedient, when Chuck took over from the DJ, killed the music, and announced that the club was closing due to a potential health issue. “Walk slowly to the exits,” he warned, “and public health officials will assist you.” There was some shoving and squawking, but after Sarah put a drunk frat boy on his ass for trying to push to the front people were a bit more orderly, and Chuck put on some light jazz to improve the mood.

Then they had to go around corralling the people who were too drunk to comprehend Chuck’s instructions, at least two of whom clearly thought that the reason the lights had gotten so bright and the music so weird was because of the drugs they were on. One of them was awfully handsy, too, and Chuck had to dodge a lot of groping, though at least he got to see Sarah frown in disapproval. Chuck was a little worried that the agents outside wouldn’t be able to distinguish the effects of dead man’s blood from the effects of being totally blitzed, so he fed the girl a couple of drops from his remaining stash and all she did was throw up on his shoes. Good enough, he figured, and handed her out.

“Casey!” Sarah’s raised voice cut through the smooth sounds of piano and saxophone. “What happened?”

Casey smiled, which made the blood smeared on his face look a lot scarier. “There were a couple extra vamps in the basement.”

“Are you okay?” Chuck demanded. “Is that blood from a—get it _off_ , you could be at risk—”

“Not if he didn’t get bit,” Dean said, sounding out of breath as he hobbled up behind Casey. “Anyway, ’s just human.” Then he crumpled.

So then there was more shouting and running around, and Sam proved that he was as good a field medic as he was a monster hunter, which Casey also seemed to love. Chuck was getting the feeling that Casey thought he’d ended up with the wrong Stanford dropout.

“One of the new vamps had a cellphone, texted a message before we got him,” Casey reported, handing over the phone.

“Let’s get back to Castle and track the call,” Chuck suggested, which they did. By which he meant that _he_ traced the call to a cell tower near where the final tracker was also showing up, a foreclosed house in a relatively nice neighborhood.

The team the military sent out found only an abandoned phone and a bloody chip.

The thing was, Chuck might not have been the greatest vampire slayer, but he did have other skills. Casey was mooning over the Winchesters, going so far as to sit next to Dean and tell him war stories while the blood transfused into him.

Chuck wasn’t jealous. Not even, like, for half a second. But he _was_ a darned good researcher, so he brought up the databases and looked into the background of their last, cleverest vampire. The military had managed to identify her as Jane Sherman, born 1980. Disappeared from her home in 2005. That made her new, though the Winchesters hadn’t been clear on whether there were really a lot of Lestat-old vampires walking around—Chuck had to think that there’d be an overpopulation problem unless the numbers got kept down either by hunters or by internecine warfare—anyway, vampire population dynamics aside, Jane Sherman had enough of a record as a human to be a relatively known quantity.

And she was from California. LA, to be exact, which might explain why the escapees had gone to ground there. The question was whether she was smart enough to stay away from the people she’d known back before her life had been taken from her.

Chuck thought about Ellie, what he’d do in similar circumstances. Maybe there were people who could leave their pasts entirely. But he wasn’t going to bet on it.

A few more minutes of work determined that Jane’s parents were dead, but that her sister was still living in LA. She’d filed the first police report and she’d never found out what happened to her sister, but she still called every year to see if there’d been any change in the status of the case. Chuck knew what that felt like: losing someone with no explanation whatsoever. Kelly Sherman loved Jane, had never stopped, and Chuck hoped that it went the other way too.

****

Sam pulled Dean aside when they got back to the secret underground lair (no, that was not going to stop being cool any time soon). “How sure are we that we can trust these guys?” he asked, low like somehow that wouldn’t get picked up on the concealed microphones undoubtedly monitoring them.

Dean shrugged. “Can’t trust the feds in general, that’s for sure. Like I said, have you never seen a movie? But these guys—you tell me, Sam.”

Sam frowned and his mouth did that bit-into-a-kumquat thing that usually only Dean could trigger. “Stanford was a long time ago. Anyway, you seem to be getting along fine with them.”

Dean raised his eyebrows—that was a problem now? Okay, yes, the last new guy he’d found it easy to hunt with had been Gordon Walker, but Dean was much more together now. Well, much more experienced. Much more—whatever. “I’m not lookin’ to put a ring on it. But your buddy called us in for a reason, and as long as we’re killing vampires, I don’t see how we can walk away.”

“I know you wish we had something more stable,” Sam said, and then looked about as embarrassed to have said it as Dean was to hear it.

Dean didn’t want to go there, mostly because he wouldn’t get back out if he did. “You saying this place is cooler than my baby? Because if you’ve got a beef with _our_ home base, Sam—”

Sam sighed heavily, and looked like he was considering pushing further, but then Chuck was coming around the corner to collect them for an update. While Chuck herded them, Dean tried to figure out how to reassure Sam that he wasn’t harboring a secret desire to become a fed and get awesome guns and amazing tech, but that way lay talking about what _Sam_ could be doing instead of hunting, so he focused his attention on the big computer screen in the main room, which was showing a satellite map.

Sarah launched right in: “Surveillance says the patterns of activity around Kelly Sherman’s condo are unusual. Lots of coming and going at night, not so much during the day.”

“Could one vampire really have taken over a whole condo?” Chuck asked, sounding appalled.

Sam and Dean exchanged glances. Dean could’ve told him about some of the grimmer scenes they’d encountered, but even thinking about that felt kind of like planning to kick a puppy. Sam clearly was of the same mind. “It’s possible,” Sam said apologetically.

“A completely infested building,” Casey mused.

Dean nodded at him. “Get in the HVAC, spread some dead man’s blood around, could make it real simple.”

Sam shot him a look, and Dean couldn’t tell whether it was ‘you idiot, it’s never simple,’ or ‘you idiot, you’re talking about maybe dozens of lives sacrificed.’ Didn’t matter, because Dean wasn’t about to go in assuming that all he needed was a fine mist of dead man’s blood, and because they couldn’t save anybody who was already dead. Up to and including the vamp’s sister. Now _that_ had real clusterfuck potential. Given what they’d seen from vampires who were just fucking, weren’t even real _family_ , Dean was not about to get careless.

The funny thing was, when the time came the operation was a cakewalk, mostly. They pumped Casey’s anticoagulant-laden spray into the air through every vent, went in, and found twenty new vamps, all so easy to kill that Dean felt more like a butcher than a hunter. Chuck made some noises about checking to see if they were all killers, but anybody who’d turned double-digits’ worth of people into monsters wasn’t training them to be vegetarians, and both Dean and Sam had kept their mouths shut about Lenore just to keep the moral confusion to a minimum, so that argument didn’t outlast the first couple of executions. After all that, Jane Sherman wasn’t among the catch.

They did keep the sister alive. Kelly. It was important to know their names if you wanted to get the most out of them. After some debate (Chuck was worried about what would happen at the Buy More if they took Kelly back to the secret government lair and she escaped), they decided to question her right where she was. Tied up six ways to Sunday, of course, and dosed with just enough dead man’s blood to keep her sluggish.

“Where’s Jane?” Sarah asked, standing in front of Kelly and radiating danger. God, that was hot. Sam kicked Dean’s ankle, because he cockblocked even Dean’s fantasies, and Dean forced his attention back to the vampire, as outnumbered and incapacitated as she was.

“Eat shit and die,” Kelly slurred. Her head slumped to the side, but the gleam in her eyes said she was ready to tear out the first throat that got near enough.

Sarah eyed Kelly carefully, as if assessing just where to hit first. Dean saw Chuck’s worried expression over Sarah’s shoulder. Worried for her, not worried that she wouldn’t be able to get it out of Kelly if she worked hard enough. Like Chuck thought that there was still something for Sarah to lose, as far in the life as she already was, and a couple of years back Dean would’ve thought how almost cute that was. He knew better now: there was always another step down.

“You know,” he said, “why don’t you guys secure this place, so that Jane can’t come back and get the jump on us. I’ll take care of this.”

Sarah raised a skeptical eyebrow. “You’ve been trained in interrogation?”

He grinned without humor, suppressing the urge to tell her that it wasn’t exactly interrogation he’d spent his time learning. “I can get a demon to give up its secrets, no worries.”

He could feel Sam behind him, radiating Do Not Want, and it just pissed him off. Yeah, Sam meant well and it was sweet that he cared about Dean’s mental health, but they needed to find this vampire and Dean wasn’t going to get any nicer if he refrained from using his skills here.

Kelly was recovering enough to catch the bad vibe in the room and cringe away from them, as much as she could. That was good; he could tell she wouldn’t give him much trouble once he really got started. She’d probably been a nice girl before all this. Her sister had probably thought that she was doing Kelly a favor turning her, because of what happened in this world to nice girls.

Dean made himself concentrate on the task at hand. “Sam?” he asked.

“Yeah, okay,” Sam said, somewhere between disappointed and accepting. “I’m going to set some traps in case Jane comes back. I could use some help.”

Sam managed to get Casey and Sarah to follow him, but Chuck stayed. Dean could’ve warned him off, but he was getting impatient—Kelly had been tied up and waiting for so long, and ever since he’d realized that he’d need to persuade her he’d felt the old red haze waiting for him, familiar as the taste of his own blood.

“All righty,” Dean said cheerily, extracting his knife from his back pocket. “I’ve got some questions for you, Kelly.”

Dean flipped the knife in the air, easily, like it wasn’t even a trick, so that he was holding the hilt with the blade pointing down. “I’m gonna tell you something, and you probably don’t care, but I think it’s interesting.” He waited a second, tilting his head expectantly. She stared at him, frozen, as if he were the kind of predator who only attacked when something moved. Oh well. “Before I went to Hell, I didn’t have a favorite knife. Sure, I _thought_ I did. Turns out it’s not the same thing.”

Then he stepped forward.

****

Chuck knew that vomiting was not going to increase their credibility with the vampire. And he’d seen the pile of corpses in Kelly Sherman’s bedroom; voluntary or not, she’d exited the human race and taken a whole bunch of people with her. Chuck got that. But still—

“Hey, Chuck, I bet Sam and the rest of them could use a hand,” Dean said without turning, cheery enough that the horror-movie vibe notched up another level. Kelly—the vampire, Chuck needed to think of her as the vampire—made a whimpering sound, but Chuck couldn’t really see why what with Dean’s body mostly between her and Chuck.

Dean had given him a good excuse, and Chuck took it. Dean didn’t look away from his work.

Sam was waiting just outside Kelly’s apartment, grabbing at Chuck’s elbow and dragging him far enough down the hall that Dean wouldn’t be overhearing them. “Is he--? Is he okay?”

Chuck swallowed, not knowing where to begin on answering that. “I thought, you know, he’s doing it for us, for all of us, for _humanity_ really, it’s sort of my duty to bear witness at least, right?” Sam nodded sympathetically, like that had made sense, even though his grip didn’t slacken. “I mean, he seems pretty much as calm as when he started. Is that good? It’s bad if the job gets to you, I know, but now I’m thinking it’s maybe bad if it _doesn’t_ , too.”

“You get stuck in this life, and it gets stuck in you,” Sam said, which Chuck took as agreement of a sort. “But Dean—”

“He, uh, he told her he’s not enjoying it.” Dean had said that like a guy observing that there was a bulb burnt out in the bathroom: like there was a boring but standard task ahead of him.

“Chuck,” Sam said, careful. “Dean’s survived a lot. He might be—flippant, but you saw at the bar, he knows what he’s hunting. He’s one of the good guys.”

In Chuck’s recent but still extensive experience, this was not something that ordinarily needed to be said about actual good guys. Not that he disbelieved Sam, not necessarily. It was just something he’d had cause to wonder about himself, and about Sarah. If you live a secret life destroying evil, without even the recognition that cops and firefighters get, do you eventually become that which you fight? Was that going to be the price, and was Chuck willing to pay it, or to watch Sarah pay it, the way Sam was already watching Dean pay?

“That’s not a person in there, Chuck,” Sam said, his eyes wide and sincere, as if sensing Chuck’s uncertainty.

“Now, Sammy, I’m offended,” Dean said almost in Chuck’s ear, and he jumped half a foot.

Dean chuckled warmly, and he wasn’t nearly as scary as when he’d been questioning Kelly even though he had a fleck of dried blood on the bridge of his nose. “Relax, Chuck, I’m real good at telling the monsters from the people these days.”

Sam’s mouth tightened, but before he could say anything, Dean continued: “She didn’t know exactly where Jane went, but apparently dear sis always wanted a recording career and went and found herself a studio where she can produce an album. Gonna take advantage of the Twilight phenomenon, at least that’s the plan, all dolled up like that ‘Bring Me to Life’ chick.”

“So we’re going after a glampire?” Chuck asked before he could think better of it.

Dean sniggered, moving even further away from the person who’d been questioning the vampire. “You just don’t quit, do you? I like that.”

Sam’s nostrils flared; Chuck remembered one time at Stanford when Sam had gotten into a huge argument with a guy in their study group about compulsory health insurance, and back then he hadn’t been nearly as scary when angry but somehow the expression was the same. Usually Chuck’s humor went over better with non-Casey people, but Chuck thought maybe Sam was more focused on Dean’s reaction, embarrassed or—wait, was Sam _jealous_ that Chuck made Dean laugh? Then Sam blinked, like clouds clearing from the sky, and tilted his head. “Since when do you listen to Evanescence?” he asked Dean.

“Since MTV,” Dean said, unfazed. “Anyhow, we need to find ourselves a recording studio that’s suddenly doing midnight hours. You up for it?” he asked, turning to Chuck. “Your supergeek thing’s worked so far.”

“I’m pretty sure a lot of these places operate around the clock already,” Chuck said, “because recording stars can have stranger habits than vampires, but I can definitely take a look at the data.”

“Awesome,” Dean said, and slapped him on the back just hard enough to rock him forward. “Now we just need to clean up this place.”

“Sarah and Casey will call it in,” Chuck reminded them. “I think they might just burn the whole building down. They say there’ll be fewer questions that way, though I personally would wonder about the fire safety codes if I read about it.”

Dean’s eyes lit up. “I’ll go see if they need help.”

Sam and Chuck were left staring at each other. Sam’s smile was a bit strained. “Dean likes setting fires. I mean, not randomly,” he hurried, perhaps realizing that he was making Dean sound like even more of a psycho, which considering what Chuck had just watched took some effort. “But it’s a standard method of disposal for ghosts, burning the bones, and it can be—satisfying.”

Chuck could see that. Getting rid of a ghost seemed like a nice, modular problem to solve. Not like taking down a global terrorist cell. “What about Kelly?” he asked, because even a vampire shouldn’t be burned alive. Undead. But the look in Sam’s eyes told him that his concern was misplaced.

****

Before Dean had even managed to finish the burger he’d snagged for lunch, Chuck found Jane’s demo tape on some music website somewhere. (Sam had rolled his eyes at Dean’s bull-headed ignorance about the internet, as usual, while Dean had pointed out that they still called it a “demo tape,” meaning that even internet idiots respected the achievements of the classics, and the resulting scuffle had taken up most of the time required for Chuck to track down Jane’s studio.) She was using a stage name, for which Dean could hardly blame her; even Joan Jett wasn’t born that way.

Still, Dean wasn’t so sure that Plain Jane and the Prowlers was the best name. The music wasn’t Sam’s emo crap when Chuck played it for them, which put it well outside the range of Dean’s experience of modern bands. “What would you call that?” Chuck asked. “It’s got a sort of coldwave feel, with some beauty and the beast aesthetics layered on top.”

“Think you nailed it, buddy,” he said, because Chuck looked like he could use some appreciation, and also because it would annoy Sam no end: if Sam had said something like that, the mockery would’ve been eternal.

Chuck grinned happily, and that was Dean’s good deed for the day taken care of.

Then it was just loading up on concealed weaponry and driving.

They got inside the studio the easy way: Chuck told the speaker at the entrance that they’d heard her demo tape and would like to talk about something called a ‘360 deal.’ The door clicked open before he was done talking.

The building seemed empty as they walked through, nobody even sitting at the front desk. They didn’t know if she was watching the security cameras, so they couldn’t afford to split up and search.

Sarah, looking as hot as ever in her royal blue business suit and executive bun, led the way. The vampire was standing at the end of the hallway, trying to control her smile (Dean briefly wondered if she was struggling to keep the teeth hidden, but from what he recalled it wasn’t happiness that posed the challenge). Dark hair, dark eyes, hipster skinny, black tattoos peeking out from under the sleeves of her black T-shirt—Dean could definitely imagine her on stage somewhere, sexy because she was so deep into the performance. If only she wouldn’t be eating her groupies, he’d have been happy to see that.

“I’m Sarah Walker,” Sarah said to the vampire, sticking her hand out. “These are my lawyers, Charles Carmichael and Sam Wesson.” Flanking her, they nodded, looking professional even with Sam’s hair flopping everywhere and Chuck’s not much better. It was probably the quality of the suits—the CIA sure had good tailors. The vampire glanced at Casey, who folded his arms. In his own black suit, along with one of those earpieces with the little corkscrews and dark sunglasses, he made a convincing bodyguard.

Dean had refused to wear a monkey suit, preferring to stick with what worked for him. “I’m Dean,” he said, giving the vampire a wave. That seemed to be enough for her; she probably watched _Entourage_.

“My engineer is out,” she said—Dean hoped that was true and not code for ‘bled dry in the recording booth’—“but I can speak for everyone here.”

Sarah took her cue to peer over the vampire’s shoulder. “ _Is_ there anyone else here?” she asked. “Because—” lowering her voice—“we are really most interested in _you_ , if you understand my meaning.”

The vampire hesitated—leftover loyalty?—and then shook her head. “I can do that,” she said, pushing her shoulders back and straightening, though she was still a couple of inches shorter than Sarah. “Anyway, I’ve been having some artistic differences with the rest of the group.”

Yeah, Dean thought, they saw themselves as alive and you saw them as dead.

“Wonderful,” Sarah said, smiling sharklike, nothing like she’d been at the bar but just as convincing. “Why don’t we sit down?”

When the vampire turned to lead them deeper into the studio, Sarah stabbed her in the back with a needle coated with dead man’s blood, and had her head off as fast as Dean could’ve done it himself.

“Okay,” Chuck said on a shuddering breath. “Well, that was—okay. At least she died happy, thinking she was going to be a star.”

“The poor sucker,” Dean said, shaking his head.

Sam winced; Chuck winced; Sarah winced. Casey sneered, but on him it somehow looked more like a grin.

And that was when the Prowlers, who were not in fact dead, showed up.

Dean only saw the others in flashes, too focused on saving his own ass and watching Sammy’s back to do more than note a particularly beautiful dive-and-roll (Sarah), a headshot right between the eyes (Casey), and a weird but effective split kick setting both kickees up to have their heads taken off by Sam and Casey (Chuck).

The spies were adaptable when the vamps were able to take more punishment than an ordinary human. Dean felt almost patriotic, watching them. And dodging, swinging, and kicking some skanky vampire ass of his own, of course. Still, it was nice to see a team together, deep in the hunt, the way he and Sam were. Maybe things weren’t perfect between them, but the job was important enough to shut your mouth and help each other out, like Sam did when he rammed his knife straight through the sternum of a vampire who was about to rip Dean’s throat out. Dean nodded his approval, and even through the blood and chaos he could see Sam’s face light up.

No doubt it was screwed up that this was the best approval he had to offer, Dean thought as he rolled and came up on one knee, hamstringing one vamp and knocking another towards Sam’s waiting machete on the backswing. He ducked another attacker—fuck, Jane had made herself a freaking orchestra, not a backup band—and, he could not make this shit up, _tripped_ one headed towards Chuck. A quick slice and dice took care of that one, along with the screaming hamstrung vampire (who was really getting on Dean’s nerves), and just as suddenly as the assault had begun it was over, nothing but five people panting loudly in a room Jackson Pollocked with vampire backsplash. Even Sarah looked somewhat less smoking covered with more blood than Carrie at the prom.

“Wow,” Chuck said into the silence. His eyes were very wide. “Can we go back to hunting down terrorists now?”

****

Chuck was a little surprised when the knock on his apartment door turned out to be Dean Winchester. He’d pretty much expected the Winchesters to blow out of town before the blood dried, especially now that they’d all seen Dean in action, and Sam had seen them seeing Dean in action. Chuck had the uneasy feeling that Dean wasn’t even the scariest one between the two of them.

“Uh, hi,” he said, standing in the door, and made a split-second decision that he hoped wasn’t going to get him messily killed. “You want to come in?”

Dean nodded and ambled past him, taking in Chuck’s apartment with a casual thoroughness that was not too different from the way Sarah and Casey scanned a room. Sometimes Chuck wondered what the world looked like to them: everything assessed for its potential utility in defense and attack, like a very specialized form of Intersect.

“I’m gonna ask you a personal question,” Dean announced as soon as Chuck closed the door. “Sam always says I have bad boundaries. So: why aren’t you with her? Or,” Dean hesitated before continuing, “with them?”

Chuck thought there was probably a point in his life when he would have blushed. “It’s … complicated.”

Dean smiled lopsidedly. “Yeah, I don’t do complicated. But, uh, one-night stands—I totally do those.”

It took Chuck a couple of seconds to decode that. “Oh. Oh! Wow.”

Dean shrugged like Chuck’s surprise meant nothing. “Whatever, dude.”

“Wait!” Chuck held up both of his hands. “That was supremely and absolutely in no way a no. More like a general expression of amazement at, well, my life. I, uh, would’ve thought you’d go for Casey before me.” It was astonishing that getting hit on by a guy who was both as butch as Dean and as nuclear-hot as Dean was far from the least plausible thing that had happened to Chuck in the past year. Regardless, it was pretty near the top of the list of the _best_ things that had happened.

Dean grinned, leaning back against the wall by the door, showing himself off with a shamelessness that was absolutely not attractive. “So was that a yes, or just not a no?”

Chuck swallowed. He loved Sarah (and he wasn’t going near what he felt for Casey), but Dean was just – different. He was offering something as unlike what Chuck had with Sarah as, well, as a vampire was unlike a person. But hopefully less dangerous. “Yes?”

Dean’s smile widened. “I bet you’ve got a perfectly good bed somewhere back there. Care to give me a tour?”

Chuck swayed forward, but before he gave in completely he had to know: “Does that actually work on women?”

That earned him a pout, but not a real one; Dean wasn’t taking him seriously, any more than he took Sam seriously, which was maybe not the best comparison Chuck could have made, but anyway: “That’s why I’m so good-looking.”

Chuck thought the causation on that was probably reversed. But he got the point, especially when Dean moved closer and put his hands on Chuck’s waist, all grace and confidence and bowlegged swagger. He let Dean pull him into his room.

Dean might’ve been butch in the streets, but he was downright eager to please in the sheets, or anyway the upright version of the sheets. He let Chuck take his time with the kissing, tilting his head up and melting into Chuck with absolute confidence. Even when Chuck wobbled on his feet, Dean just rocked back and stabilized them both, walking backwards until Chuck had him pressed up against a convenient wall, where they could rub against each other without any fear of falling.

“So what do you do?” Dean asked after they were both breathless and Dean’s lips were swollen from kissing.

Chuck only barely prevented himself from saying ‘I work at the Buy More,’ as if this were a first date, and blushed harder in shame at his own social awkwardness than from figuring out what Dean was really asking. “I’m pretty vanilla, really,” Chuck said at last. “I like all the, uh, standard things.”

Dean grinned as his fingers flew over the buttons of Chuck’s shirt. “So, you want me to suck your cock?”

Chuck was never actually sure if he answered in words, but a couple of minutes later Chuck’s button-down was gone and his pants were around his ankles as he concentrated on not falling over while Dean’s mouth did amazing, unbelievable, hot, wet things to him. Chuck narrated, because that’s what he did, and Dean’s eyes glinted up at him through those ridiculous lashes with humor and what Chuck took as encouragement. Dean made a hot little moan when Chuck put a hand in his hair, and so Chuck took that as permission to thrust, his fingers tightening and getting no purchase on Dean’s short, gel-stiff hair.

Dean’s tongue was soft and his throat tight, and Chuck came and came. Dean swallowed, making it even better, pulling back just before Chuck finished, so the last of it caught on his lips. Dean’s smirk would’ve been filthy even if it hadn’t been smeared with Chuck’s come; as it was, Chuck’s cock made a valiant attempt to get hard all over again.

Dean allowed him to stay Windows-frozen for a minute, then half-led, half-shoved him to the bed. Without really understanding how, Chuck found himself all the way naked, and then he was on his stomach, Dean spreading his legs apart with his warm hands high on Chuck’s thighs.

“Um,” he managed, realizing that Dean hunted monsters for a living, and so maybe for Dean ‘vanilla’ meant ‘no tentacles please.’

“Relax,” Dean said in a voice that was honey-thick and strangely not at all relaxing, “you’ll like this.” Then he did something inconceivable with his mouth, and Chuck was too busy gasping and moaning to disagree, and then he _didn’t_ disagree, and when Dean’s fingers got involved Dean said, “Relax, you’ll like this” _again_ , which was even more implausible, but by the time Dean said, “Relax, you’ll like this” for the third time, Chuck was more than convinced, and he said so until Dean said, “God, do you _ever_ shut up?” but not like he was pissed off about it, and Chuck babbled into the pillow while Dean fucked him with such enthusiasm that the mattress squeaked and the headboard thudded against the wall hard enough to crack the paint, which Chuck had never actually believed happened, but then Chuck had recently learned that lots of things that he thought were mythical were only very, very unlikely.

Afterwards, Chuck melted into the sheets, not caring how messed up they were, and made happy little purring-type sounds while Dean patted him. It was comfortable, even though they didn’t really know each other and were never going to do this again—or maybe because of that.

Eventually, he fell asleep.

****

Sam was up when Dean snuck back in. Dean wouldn’t ever admit it except under torture (he’d learned the hard way that there was really no such thing as ‘never’ in their worlds), but he liked that Sam was worried enough to stay up, even though he could’ve lived without the impending bitchfest.

“So …” Sam said, of course, leaning up against the headboard of his bed.

“Sew buttons,” Dean said, and Sam looked at him like he’d started speaking Italian.

“Where have you been?” Sam asked, giving up. “You didn’t—you couldn’t’ve been with _Sarah_ ,” as if Dean hadn’t pulled harder girls.

“No,” Dean said. “More ‘n that, don’t ask, ‘cause I’m not gonna tell.”

Sam looked at him with suspicion as he passed by on the way to brush his teeth, probably wondering if Dean even knew that it sounded like he’d slept with Casey. Dean didn’t mind Sam wondering. Keeping Sam on his toes wasn’t always easy—but it was _always_ fun.

****

The Winchesters swung by the Buy More, supposedly to check and make sure that everything was squared away with the government, but given the bags Dean carried down to Castle Chuck thought he was probably more interested in loading up with every piece of the armory Casey would give him. Sam waited upstairs with Chuck at the Nerd Herd counter.

“How did Dean get Casey to like him?” Chuck asked Sam, since most days he thought Casey just barely tolerated Chuck, and Charles Carmichael didn’t do much better.

Sam shrugged, his expression discontented. “No clue.” Then, after some hesitation: “I think Dean does well with structure, you know? When everyone has a place, and works together. He would’ve done well in the military, if—” He looked down.

Chuck didn’t mean to make Sam all maudlin. “Well, you guys have friends in the military now. I’m not saying you can rely on us to get you out of everything, but we’ll do what we can if you need info, or maybe official cover once in a while.”

Sam raised his head and smiled, and it was broad and dimpled, sincere even though he still looked bone-tired. “Thanks, man. Hard to believe we used to think physics was the toughest obstacle we faced, isn’t it?”

Chuck nodded. “But on the other hand, we do get to save the world a lot.”

Sam chuckled. “There is that.”

At that point, Dean returned, carrying two bags so loaded that Chuck could see he was struggling to pretend they were easy to carry. Chuck shuddered to think what was in them, or, more to the point, what Jeff and Lester would do with what was in them. He needed to get those bags out of the Buy More quickly, because the best scenario here was that Dean would cut off Jeff and Lester’s sticky fingers.

“Take these out to the car,” Dean ordered. Chuck waited for Sam to snap at Dean’s tone, but Sam just rolled his eyes and accepted the bags. _He_ didn’t seem to have any trouble with the weight, and Dean’s expression as he watched Sam depart was a bit disgruntled, as if he’d hoped for at least a protest, if not a struggle. Dean leaned on the counter and tilted his head, giving Chuck a bright and micron-thin grin.

“One-night stand, hunh?” Chuck asked, not really unhappy with the expected answer.

Dean shrugged. “Not much room in my life for more’n that.”

“Yeah,” Chuck agreed, wistful. “And of course I’m sure you were in no way sublimating any issues you have with Stanford dropouts taller than you are with freaky stuff in their brains, any more than I was sublimating my issues with guys with gun fetishes and jawlines like Greek gods.”

Dean’s face blanked with surprise, then slowly flushed. He turned his face away with a small coughlike sound and said without turning back, “Don’t forget trouble talking about my feelings. Not that I know what ‘sublimate’ means.”

“Of course not,” Chuck agreed. “Like I told Sam, call if you need us.”

“Yeah, sure,” Dean said, exactly as unconvincing as Chuck had expected. But that was the virtue of working with a team, he knew: Dean didn’t have to make all the right decisions, as long as someone else was there to talk sense to him. “Friendly advice, dude: don’t wait too long to ask for what you want. This life doesn’t come with a retirement plan.”

“I know,” Chuck said, and he did, really. “I’m just waiting for the bruises to go down.”

Startled, Dean flicked his eyes over Chuck’s neck, as if worried he’d left visible marks. Chuck shook his head, smiling, to show that he wasn’t talking about anything physical. Dean rubbed the back of his head, looking a lot like Casey when matters of the heart came up. “Probably get new bruises tomorrow, though.”

Chuck sighed. “I hear you.” Sarah knew how he felt, but she could probably stand to hear it again, to know that nothing had changed. And Casey—God only knew how that conversation would go, but Chuck should probably find out. “Take care, okay?”

Dean half-shrugged. “Just don’t let the feds let out any more vampires,” he said, and then he was walking away, six feet of leather jacket and attitude swaggering through the white-and-plastic of the Buy More like a refugee from the auto parts store on the other side of the mall.

Chuck watched him go, and not just because of the rear view. You had to be pretty brave to do their kinds of jobs, he knew. But sometimes it was so much easier to put your life on the line than your heart. Chuck had done both, but the need didn’t stop with one time.

And, if there really were vampires, then who was Chuck to stop believing in happy endings too?


End file.
